Sweet Romance12 min read
Thirteen Nights, One Smile
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"I saw him smile," I said into the phone, my voice small and brittle.
"Where are you?" the operator asked. "Can you tell me the address?"
"Hope—" I started, then stopped. I always said my name twice when I was shaking. "Hope Soares. Jiaxing Complex, Block 13, Floor 21. Someone is being killed across from my window."
"Stay inside. Don't approach. Help is on the way." The voice was calm. I tried to be calm, too. I pulled the curtain closed with hands that felt like ice.
The curtain left a slit. I reached a finger through and filmed the opposite window. The frame showed blood and a body and a shadow moving. Five seconds. The man wearing the smile looked up—toward me—and the world blackened.
I woke in my own bed with a burning pain in my side and a taste of metal in my mouth. My hands were clean. The scar wasn't there. The phone on my bedside read 9:00 PM.
"You're dreaming," I whispered to myself. "You're alive." I crawled to the window.
Across the way, the same window bled. The same figure bent over a woman. The man turned and smiled at me.
"I'm not crazy," I told the empty room. "I am not crazy."
When it happened again and again, the first honest thing I did was run. I ran to the neighbors' doors, knocked, barged into one apartment, into the next. Once, a man in a pressed shirt answered and invited me in because my panic must have convinced him I was sick. He watched my clothes like a hawk.
"Can I use your bathroom?" I said.
"Of course," he answered, but the way he held out his phone to me and didn't let go made my skin crawl.
"I—" I tried to explain.
He stepped closer. "You look like trouble," he said. He smelled of aftershave and pennies. His name was Jasper. Jasper Choi.
"Get away," I said, and his face changed, small and quick. He was heavier than he looked. He was fast. I used everything I had. I remember a table lamp. I remember a sharp, hot sting on his head. I remember the stairs like a wind tunnel and the landing at the bottom where the masked man waited and I let the air leave me like a balloon.
I woke again at nine.
"No more running," I told myself. "This is a pattern."
I learned three hard rules fast. One: the smile is the mark. I never learned the killer's face fully—only the smile, the way his mouth curved like a secret. Two: fifteen minutes was the window from the first sighting to my death. Three: nothing else about the night stayed fixed. People changed. Doors were locked differently. My choices mattered.
"Hello," said a calm voice from the stairwell one late loop. "You okay?"
I froze. I wasn't ready to trust anyone. My chest was a drum of warning. The man looked tired, like he'd been up all day. He held a flashlight like it was an ordinary tool.
"You live upstairs?" he asked.
"Yes." I wanted to run. I didn't. "Do you—do you belong to this building?"
He put his hand up. "Nelson Wood. I live two floors below. I heard noise."
When he stayed and didn't try to speak me down or charm me, I felt odd relief. "I saw something," I said, the words tumbling out. "A woman was killed. The man looked straight at me. He smiled."
Nelson said nothing at first. He watched me with a focused, practical face. "Did you call the police?"
"Once. They came. They... it's complicated." I told him what had happened in loops and lies and truths, and he listened.
"Come in," he said finally. "Sit down. Let me get you water."
When he handed me a bottle, his hand brushed mine. It felt safe. That night, when the killer forced his way in, Nelson grabbed me and pushed me into an elevator and drove us out of the building toward the police station. We crashed and burned in ways I will never forget. The truck. Fire. Sometimes death is quick, sometimes slow; in some loops it was a single knife; in others it was a car that turned into a wall of flame.
We learned together. Nelson learned about timing. I learned about pattern. We tested little changes—calling the police earlier, staying put, barricading the door. Sometimes we bought time. Sometimes the killer changed method, sometimes he didn't. Each death felt like a tally mark beating on my ribs.
"Why me?" I asked Nelson once, after a loop where we had cornered ourselves and come out alive but shaken.
He shrugged. "Why anyone?" He tried to be casual. He handed me his jacket. "You need to stop saying that. You're not 'meant' for anything."
His voice was quick and practical and stubborn in the way that makes people you can trust. I began to say “we” instead of “I.” He would joke, "Sister," and I would smack his arm. It became easier.
But trust is a fragile thread cut by a single doubt. One night—once—after we escaped a near miss and I had accepted Nelson's plan for us to hide in his friend's empty apartment, I remember a water bottle. Nelson handed me water and watched me sip. My hands remembered loops where I had nearly died from being poisoned—no solid proof, just shadows in my head. The taste of water came back wrong to me. I felt dizzy. I woke in a dark place.
"Why would you—?" I wanted to say to him. The accusation hung heavy.
Nelson's reaction to my sudden coldness was a mixture of hurt and disbelief and blunt anger. "I would never," he said. "Do you think I would do that after—after all this? I risked my life for you."
"Then why..." I trailed off. I didn't know. I felt sick with the possibility I might be wrong.
He looked at me like someone who had been punched. "If you don't trust me, say it. I can take it."
There's a moment when the world slows and you can choose to throw everything away or to hold on tighter. I held on. We kept going.
The killer—Raj Fedorov—always stayed a collected phantom until the net closed. We started to leave traps. We learned his rhythm. We learned the police's limits.
One of the most important nights was the night we finally had the chance to force a public answer for the small, vile men who preyed on women in our building—the man who tried to take advantage of me when I ran in pajamas, Jasper Choi.
Jasper seemed like a small-time predator. He had a neat smile, a polite voice to neighbors, and the kind of hands that lingered where they shouldn't. He was not the kind of monster you put on a wanted poster, but he was the kind of man who makes safe places unsafe.
On the night the loop turned, after so many deaths, after the killer's figure had vanished from sight at least for the night, we decided to do more than survive. We collected footage, we collected statements. We recorded the lamp fight, we filmed footprints in the hallway, we kept the lamp as evidence and made copies of the timeline. Mariano Bacon—Nelson's friend and a large man with a booming laugh—helped. He was the one who had shouted at Jasper months earlier when Jasper got too close in the laundry room. Mariano believed me from the start.
"Let's show them everything," Mariano said, his voice a deep anchor. "Put it where everyone will see."
We petitioned the building association to hold a public meeting. They obliged, mostly because neighbors were frightened by the talk. The local police station sent an escort. Tomas Picard, a calm officer with narrow eyes, sat at the edge of the room like a man waiting to be surprised.
The hall filled beyond capacity. People carried phones. They whispered like the rustle of dry leaves. The smell of instant coffee and cheap chairs hung in the air. I stood behind a microphone with Nelson on one side and Mariano on the other.
"Thank you for coming," I started. "I am Hope Soares. I—" My throat closed. "I've told the police what I saw across the street. I survived... many times. But there's another danger in our building."
Murmurs. Phones lifted. Eyes sharped into knives.
"I will show you footage of what happened to me," I said. "And I will show you how one man pretended to help and instead took advantage."
Jasper sat at the back, the same polite face, the same cheap perfume. He had no idea we were about to pull his mask off.
I clicked play.
The footage was messy. It was shaky. My voice in the video was raw. But it showed what mattered: Jasper's hand on my waist when I wanted only a door; his eyes on me when I tried to leave; the lamp strike and his fall. It showed the way he blocked the door in his apartment.
They watched his face as if looking at a stranger's photograph and realizing they had been polite to a small animal that would bite.
When the video ended, a silence fell like a lid.
"You have video of him touching you?" a woman asked, her voice thin and high with disbelief.
"I have video of him forcing himself on me," I said. "I have testimony. I have others."
A young woman in the back stood up. "He did it to me," she said. "He cornered me in the laundry. I was too ashamed to speak." More people stood, one by one, small courage growing. A man held up his phone and scrolled through messages he had once shrugged off as "weird." A child started to cry, and a neighbor shushed him like someone calming an animal.
I watched Jasper's smile crumble. The first shift was the flicker of confusion—fairly normal when a lie meets daylight. Then a flash of anger, quick and ugly. He leaned forward like a caged thing with teeth.
"That's a lie!" he barked.
"You told me to shut up," I said. "You told me no one would believe me. You told me I was making trouble."
A chorus of voices swelled. "Liar," someone hissed. "Pervert," another said, "Get out," someone else cried.
But Jasper did not fold in silence. This is the arc I have seen on faces of men who always believed politeness would save them. He tried to dismiss it, to speak louder, to claim the tapes were edited. He fumbled his phone, tried to play messages, looking helpless. His hands shook. He sought eye contact and found only contempt.
A neighbor, an older woman who kept the building's noticeboard, pushed her chair forward. "You were always staring at the women in your hall," she spit. "I told my daughter not to go near your laundry table. I told the building guard about the cigarette smell and the way you left the washer open."
"You think I'm the only one?" someone asked. "You think you can do that to people and we won't speak up?"
Jasper's face changed from belligerence to panic. He had some dignity left; he clung to it with words that were thinner than air.
"Please, please," he begged. "It wasn't like that. I—I was helping. I—"
He looked older than he looked yesterday. The room closed in. Phones captured his every stutter. A man in the front row, bearded and loud, stood up and walked down the aisle.
"Do you remember the time you invited my niece to 'show her a better washing cycle'?" he demanded. "Do you remember how she ran from your door?"
Jasper's face turned chalky. He tried to speak and the room finished for him.
"You're a liar," someone shouted from the back. "You're a predator. Get out of our building."
At first he tried to remain upright. Then the weight of every small humiliation he'd stacked over years crashed down. He slapped a hand over his mouth as if to stow his words. His shoulders curved inward like someone being put away.
"Get him out," the building manager said finally, his voice cold and administrative. "Security, escort him."
They targeted him with a formal complaint but also with the simpler, fiercer justice of neighbors who had finally fed up. People took videos, posted them. Within hours, his "polite" face was a public thing. A thread on the building's message board lit up with messages and photos promised to be sent to his workplace. Someone called his employer and described the scene.
Jasper's response changed. First confidence. Then denial. Then brittle pleading. He tried to smile like the man he'd shown the world earlier. That smile cracked.
"You're lying," he whispered again. "You don't know—"
"Shut up." The room's sound snapped like a whip. "We know."
A woman who had been quiet all night walked up to the microphone. "I forgave you once," she said into the hush. "I told my daughter someone could be nicer. I'm sorry I did that. I was wrong."
The crowd began to move like a single animal. The manager read the complaints into the phone and told the security guards to escort Jasper out of the building. They did so, but not before the crowd followed. People shouted. Cameras filmed. A neighbor threw coffee at him—no one did that before, but that night people did what fear and anger together make people do. He fell against the stairwell wall and tried to stand.
"Don't touch me!" he cried, and the cry was small and weak.
The most terrible part was not the shove, not the push, not even the manager's rebuke. It was the way he realized everyone had seen him. The faces in the crowd were not just angry; they were disappointed in themselves for not seeing sooner. They looked at him like you look at a cracked mirror. Journalists sometimes call this 'public shaming.' He called it ruin.
Later, he called the police. Tomas Picard took a statement. Jasper tried legal threats the next day, but the building association had swarmed his landlord with emails. His employer called to say "we have to pause your shift pending an investigation." Word spread. Friends unfollowed him. The laundry room now had a sign: "If you see anything, tell management." People started traveling in pairs at night.
I watched the video of his public humiliation later, not proud. The scene stretched for nearly an hour; the community's reaction—shock, anger, recording, applause, disbelief—shook something loose in the building. Jasper's face changed from arrogance to pleas to tears and back, like a strip of film. He begged; no one listened.
The punishment was not a single slap. It was layered and slow. It was the stripping of his anonymity, the exposure to the light, the loss of neighbors' smiles and the comfortable mendacity he had relied on. It was his job suspended and his landlord's patience ending. It was his social circle shrinking day by day. Above all it was a public end to the quiet bullying he had performed. The building had decided he would not get away with small crimes. If the law followed later, that would be for the courts. For now the building had done its part: the man who used smiles as a mask lost his smile.
After that night, I slept better, though not in peace. The killer was still out there, and he had an evil that didn't care for neighbors' wrath. But the Jasper episode changed the social line. People started to look after each other. Neighbors who had once pretended not to see now left lights on, walked in pairs, and answered doors together.
We still had loops. We still died sometimes. Raj Fedorov is careful. He plans. But we learned to plan better. We told the police every pattern we observed. Tomas Picard grew from a man on a videotape into a person who brought tactical teams and a plan that didn't leave us alone at night.
There was a night we drew him into a trap on a dark side road. Police set up a roadblock in the place we chose. He followed. He thought he could intimidate his way out. He spun his car into our path and then saw the blue lights, the net. The back-and-forth lasted a few minutes that felt like an hour. A loudspeaker shouted, "Drop your weapon!" The car wouldn't stop. The officers confirmed there were weapons. A shot sounded. One. Then a silence. Nelson grabbed me and held me and I listened to the radio call for an ambulance that never arrived for the driver.
"You saw him die," I said afterward, numb.
Nelson didn't say much. "We survived tonight," he said. He said it as if it were a fragile thing.
The killing stopped. The loops stopped. The city settled. But the old threads in people didn't vanish so fast. Jasper's ruin spread, yet he came to try and salvage himself in the way fallen men do: through denial and humiliation. He kept sending angry messages. He tried to follow me one afternoon, and security kept him out, and the building's camera feed was posted to a neighborhood watch site.
Months later, in a public hearing at the police station where the community and press gathered, there was an official reading of complaints. Tomas Picard read them, his voice calm. The room was full again. The judge—no, not a judge, but a prosecutor—listened.
I stood and gave a full statement. I spoke for the women who had feared and for the ones who had spoken. Mariano stood and said, "We won't accept predation here." Nelson stood by me and squeezed my hand.
Jasper tried to speak last. "You don't understand," he began. "It's a misunderstanding."
"Misunderstanding?" a woman laughed, sharp and broken. "You called my stepson a liar in person. You told me I was too ugly for him to be interested."
At that, he crumpled. The recorded messages, the videos, the laundry room witness—these things were small and ordinary; they were not banners or grand evidence, but together they built a wall. Jasper's employer called him that week and asked him to resign. The neighborhood filed a restraining order. He had to move.
We watched him go. People clapped when the bus that took his boxes away left the curb. It was not a small thing; it was communal retribution, clean and necessary.
After everything it felt strange: people who had once looked the other way now looked after one another. The killer had been stopped, the predator exposed. I married the strange cycles of luck with action—police training, neighborhood watches, cameras. I stopped letting fear be a private thing.
A small faded joke survived between Nelson and me for years. He called me "sister" in private, and sometimes in the grocery line he'd throw his arm around me and say, "My sister here likes to complain about cheap coffee." I would shove him and he would grin, and the grin was the ordinary one of a man who loved someone.
When I finally wrote the story many people on the internet found it and wanted more. They wanted to know if the loops truly stopped. They wanted to know if the smile ever returned.
Nelson wrote a short note at the end that surprised me because it made me laugh and it made my heart ache. He posted it as if he had broken into my account.
"I'm Nelson Wood," he wrote. "Yes, she's my wife. I still call her sister. Our daughter screamed at me this morning until she was blue. I have to go. Sorry to disappoint the cliffhangers. Life is messy. No more loops."
He always made ending lines like that. I called him later, and his voice over the line was the same practical thing that had saved my life so many times.
"Are you calling me sister for real now?" I asked.
He cleared his throat. "Sometimes. Only when you are eating the last piece of cake and I want to sound offended."
"Good," I said. "Keep your hands off it."
"Promise."
I keep the lamp in a low closet. Sometimes at night I take it out and hold it like a talisman. The smile is a thing that taught me to look for small signs and not to ignore them. It taught me that courage isn't just one big moment—it is many tiny refused silences.
If you ever find yourself standing behind a curtain and see a smile that doesn't match the face, tell someone. If someone touches you wrong, tell someone. It is an ordinary act of surprising power.
The End
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